GIMP 2.9.6 released with experimental support for multithreading

Concluding more than a year of development effort, Mr Alexandre Prokoudine of GIMP has announced release of GIMP 2.9.6. This release comes with various exciting features, bug fixes and translation improvements.

One of the important highlight in GIMP 2.9.6 release is experimental multit-hreading in GEGL (Generic Graphics Library). Since the support is at it's early stage of development, it may possible that GIMP exhaust when using multiple cores. This is done deliberately to collect as many bug reports as possible, so that most of the issues can be fixed prior to release of GIMP 2.10. If you don't want to play with this experimental support, it is possible to limit number of threads in Preferences -> Resources.

Picture courtesy : GIMP 2.9.6 release announcement

While most changes for better Hi-DPI displays support are planned for v3.0, when
GIMP is expected to be based on either GTK+3 or GTK+4, we were able to remove at
least some of the friction by introducing icon sizes at different resolutions
and a switch for icon sizes on the Icon Theme page of the Preferences dialog.

Since we want to make workflows in linear color spaces more prominent in GIMP,
it was time to update the blend modes code. You can now switch between two
sets of layer modes: legacy (perceptual) and default (linear). The user
interface for switching was a quick design, we’d like to come up with something
better, so we are interested in your input.